Recently on my way home from work, my wife asked me to stop at the grocery store to pick up a few things we needed for dinner. She said, “We need chickpeas, spinach, cheese and tomatoes.” I replied, “Hold on; let me write that down,” to which she replied, “Do you really need help remembering four things?” She and I like to help each other, and we’d been having an ongoing discussion about memory. I said to her, “You’re right. I can remember four things.” I repeated the grocery items to myself a few times, then went into the store and remembered to buy what we needed.
In Plato’s work Phaedrus, which is written as a dialogue between Socrates and his interlocutor named Phaedrus, Socrates says about the invention of writing: “If [people] learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” This always comes to my mind whenever the conversation occurs about whether or not churches should be using new forms of technology in their ministry.
To some extent, Socrates was correct, as evidenced by my reaction to write down a small grocery list so that I wouldn’t have to remember it in my brain. On the other hand, 2,400 years have gone by since Socrates wrote that and, during that time, we’ve found a way to balance the utility of writing with the use of memory. Will the same be true of all new technologies we might adopt?
This came up recently during a church meeting with our communications committee. The COVID pandemic has pushed many of our churches to a point of needing to embrace technology in order to continue doing ministry together. My congregation is livestreaming worship to YouTube. We’re hosting meetings virtually — some Zoom-only, others using a hybrid model. We’ve got a very active Facebook account. But the question came up: What about Snapchat and TikTok? Should we have church accounts on those social media sites?
This question came up in the context of a discussion about church communication as it relates to caring for our young people. Many of our congregation’s children and youth aren’t comfortable coming to in-person events at the church. It’s a compassionate and pastoral instinct to wonder if we are successfully keeping them connected to our church’s ministry. We want to be sure that they aren’t overlooked and that we include them in our worship, fellowship and mission. Are our weekly emails to the congregation enough? Are they even on Facebook to see what we’re posting there? Do they feel connected through postcards and group chats?
When the question of being on Snapchat and TikTok came up, I was really impressed by the response from our associate pastor. She said that some of our youth didn’t even have any social media accounts until they graduated from high school and that other youth had parents that were leery of them being on sites like Snapchat and TikTok, specifically out of a concern over bullying and harmful messages sometimes conveyed through those sites about standards of beauty. She said, “I wouldn’t want to create church social media accounts that encourage our young people to visit sites their parents don’t want them to visit out of a concern for keeping them safe.” That might not be true for the youth in every church, but I really appreciated her wisdom about our youth.
Throughout the pandemic, I have tended toward fully embracing technology as the wave of the future. My refrain has been, “This is the era of the digital church!” However, those insightful words from our associate pastor helped me to see that even caring efforts offered with good intentions can be toxic. Probably one of the most important questions to ask before offering care is: Will this actually help? We can sometimes assume we know what “kids these days” (or anyone else, for that matter!) are doing. Our assumptions may not be correct, however.
Only time will tell what we might lose as individuals and as a society in exchange for adopting new technologies. Asking whether or not our efforts are truly helping is a good place to start. The only way to know that is to listen to the people we’re trying to help. “You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak” (James 1:19).
